Charles Mackay(1814–1889)

Charles Mackay was born in Perth on 27 March 1814, son of a Royal Navy lieutenant of the Mackay-of-Strathnaver line who had served under Nelson at Copenhagen and Trafalgar. He was schooled at the Royal Caledonian Asylum in London, the charity school for the sons of Scottish soldiers and sailors, and for two years at a private academy in Brussels.

He came to London at fifteen and took his first job as a junior reporter on the Sun in 1829. He worked across the London daily-newspaper and magazine market of the 1830s and 1840s as sub-editor, leader-writer and parliamentary sketch reporter, and was the editor who launched the Illustrated London News across its first eighteen months from 1842.

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the three-volume collection of 1841, was the breakout work: the financial speculative bubbles in the first volume, the alchemists and prophets in the second, the witch-hunts and revivals in the third. The chapters on the Mississippi Company collapse, the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Tulip Mania have been cited by the behavioural-finance literature as the classic case-studies of speculative-asset-bubble behaviour ever since. It has been continuously in print since 1841 and is, by a wide margin, the best-selling popular-finance book of the nineteenth century.

He published a large body of other work across the next forty years: the narrative poem The Salamandrine (1842), the History of the Mormons (1851), the first English-language popular history of the Latter-Day Saints, the Memoirs of the Pretender (1856), and the memoir Forty Years' Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs (1877). He served as the Times's special correspondent in the United States through the early years of the American Civil War, based in New York.

His daughter was the novelist Marie Corelli, born Mary Mackay. He died at his Wandsworth house on 24 December 1889, seventy-five years old, and is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. The Mackay name, the Highland clan surname of Strathnaver, the most northerly of the major Highland clans, he carried from the Royal Caledonian Asylum into one of the most-cited popular-finance texts of the English language.